No Man’s Land: De-Indigenization and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius in the Japanese Colonization of Hokkaido, 1869-1905

The former Tokugawa bakufu exercised varying degrees of suzerainty over the Indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido for centuries. However, increasingly direct challenges to Japanese territorial sovereignty by the rapidly expanding American, British, and Russian colonial empires pushed the new Meiji regime to formally annex Ainu territories across the northern island in 1869, claiming them as terra nullius (empty, ownerless land). Thereafter, with the support of a contingent of foreign advisors, educators, and diplomats, the modernizing Meiji state began to transform Hokkaido into an export-driven resource colony resembling not the Japanese mainland but New England. Settlers – many of them penniless former samurai – took on the role of white American frontiersmen, “breaking” a land re-imagined as uninhabited, primordial, and virginal. Meanwhile, colonialists began to re-cast the Ainu as akin to the “Indians” of the American frontier. These “Indian”-like Ainu were subjected to a series of discourses and policies which aimed to “de-Indigenize” them, conceptually rendering them non-native in their own colonized homeland. This facilitated the dispossession of their land, their resources, and ultimately, of their own bodies. A transnational settler colonial project, Hokkaido was not simply a “Westernized” region internal to Japan, but an outer territory which became “Japanese” precisely through its Westernization. And, far from an obscure outer periphery, settler colonial Hokkaido was central to the development of the modern Japanese nation-state and its wider colonial empire. Accordingly, the present study builds upon a growing wave of revisionist literature which challenges the conventional understanding that the Japanese colonial period began with the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and ended with Japan’s defeat in the Asia Pacific War in 1945. It instead understands Hokkaido as an ongoing settler colonial project.Ph.D